Still use outdated easy to hack voting machines single case we’re a U.S voting machine has been analyzed by by competent security researchers they have found vulnerabilities that would let someone inject malicious software and change election data every single case that’s Professor J Alex halderman from the University of Michigan he’s one of the
World’s leading specialists in voting systems he’s helped Congress draft legislation on how to beef up election security especially after U.S intelligence agencies found widespread hacking attempts by Russia in 2016. I know America’s voting machines are vulnerable because my colleagues and I have hacked them repeatedly as part of a
Decade of research studying the technology that operates elections and learning how to make it stronger helderman has shown how U.S voting systems will be vulnerable in 2020 elections he says up to 18 states still plan to use voting machines like this one the accuvote TSX touch screen or other versions like it
Brought one here with me today in fact and we’re going to conduct an election this machine that I brought with me um I bought this one on eBay it was used until very recently in Ohio he says malicious software can be added when basic operating data is entered for each machine
And the way that works is election officials prepare that on a PC somewhere and copy it to the machines using removable memory cards like this election officials are going to put it in the machine like this before the election but what are election officials don’t know is that I the attacker have
Already infected that memory card with malicious software here are our candidates George Washington or Benedict Arnold okay so we have one vote here for George Washington He votes for George Washington oh a narrow victory for Benedict Arnold one vote for George two votes for Ben because the malware I inserted on the memory card has stolen the election in the United States every single state independently controls how it conducts elections even for federal office some
Outsource the programming of voting machine data cards to private vendors these firms may have their own issues well here’s a vendor that did the election programming for a large fraction of my state in 2016. um here are lots of nice high resolution photographs of their warehouse in case
You want to break in so if I wanted to break into this company let’s say I was the attacker I’d probably start by forging an email from let’s say Larry the president here to sue his Administrative Assistant asking her to urgently open an attachment that malware could now spread two memory
Cards via PCS throughout the firm’s Network but if the machines aren’t actually online when you vote there’s no way to hack them right this is something that you hear all the time in the US from election officials unfortunately it’s not actually true those election management system workstations sometimes are connected to
The internet or there uh or the data that’s programmed into them passes through an Internet connected system so we’re just one or two hops away from an online attacker a senate intelligence committee report in 2019 concluded that Russian operatives attempted to hack into voting systems in all 50 states in 2016.
I I think we need to worry very much in 2020 about not only Russia but Iran China North Korea and other countries that have sophisticated cyber security offensive capabilities the U.S Congress was concerned enough to approve 380 million dollars in emergency grants for states to improve their systems in 2018.
That money came with no security requirements Believe It or Not States could use it for anything they wanted including just buying more I voted stickers halderman says just a statistical sample audit of scanned paper ballots could identify anomalies in electronic voting so how many states will do this kind of
Risk limiting audit in 2020. probably going to be fewer than half will require any kind of review of the paper record the U.S Senate has yet to take a vote on another bill to provide even more money to States for improving voting systems with a requirement for a
Paper trail and audits some Senators argue that the federal government shouldn’t tell individual states how to run their elections but this isn’t just about the United States Alderman says that all Democratic elections are vulnerable in some way this is a pattern that’s being repeated again and again in political conflicts
Across the world it’s only going to get worse
